A Breath Of Fresh Air: My New Ubuntu Desktop
—-
UPDATE: Surprisingly this post has found favour with “digg”ers :). Check the bottom of the post for some more info about the setup
UPDATE2: On popular demand, I’ve uploaded my .conkyrc. Download Conky Configuration file by clicking here and save as .conkyrc in your home folder.
After loitering around for so long, I finally got my lazy bum off the bed and installed Hardy Heron (8.04.1) onto my aging laptop. I’ve never been a sucker for eye-candy stuff, prefering to have more resources available for real work, instead of ooh-aahing over nice looking things all around my desktop. Well, but then I fell prey. I thought of giving another try to the thingamagic that compiz-fusion is, moreso since I didn’t have to go through loads of installing nuances like feisty because of it being already integrated in Hardy. An emerald install and a few minutes of tinkering later, I had a cool looking screen staring back at me. Here is a preview screenshot for your eyes but obviously the static screenshot wont show the amazing dynamic effects of CF. Let me see how many days I keep this up before going back to my plain-jane self. Click on the pic for full view:
Let me know if you have any suggestions to improve it further, or want more pics/vids of my new lappy in action, or have any of your own to share.
Update: Setup info:
-
Base Theme: Ubuntu Studio (basically for icon set. Download ubuntustudio-look package for this)
-
Controls : From Xenon theme (Inbuilt in Ubuntu)
-
Wallpaper is something named “lotus” or something. Downloaded from interfacelift.com
-
Compiz Fusion with almost all effects turned on. Ofcourse you can’t see most of them in the still image
-
Emerald theme engine for glassy and rounded window borders (Download “emerald” package)
-
Dock at the bottom is avant window navigator (awn. Download package avant-window-navigator)
-
On right side, stats etc are from conky (Download package conky)
-
Misc: Turned transparency on for most things including gnome-terminal, gnome-panel, etc.
-
Salient points:
-
The memory being consumed right now is around 850 MB. Thats with lots of applications, all CF effects turned on, most things having glass and transparent effects, and even my apache web server and mysql are running in background. And after that also, most memory (around 200 MB) is being eaten by firefox, leading to this high usage.
-
The setup boots up with just a shade over 300 MB being used, even though I’ve set CF and emerald on by default at boot and even apache and mysql start running on startup.
-
© Shantanu Goel | A Breath Of Fresh Air: My New Ubuntu Desktop
—-
If you liked this post, then you can Subscribe to my feed
This post has 14 comments
July 22nd, 2008
It would have been cool for you to tell the folks about what you’ve done to get this desktop, and especially what applications you have running on the desktop and icons.
July 22nd, 2008
Yoda: I’m at work now. Will update the post tonight with the details. Check back soon
July 23rd, 2008
Oh, dear…
October 23rd, 2008
Might want to censor your friends’ email addresses there…
Pretty spiffy desktop, though.
October 23rd, 2008
Change the green color font of conky
You can add the weather script on conky
add the cube and rotating option for compiz
Since you’re using cairo,limit the icons on the upper panel
October 23rd, 2008
Looks horrid. Using a less busy wallpaper would help.
October 23rd, 2008
Eye cancer!
October 23rd, 2008
Can you publish the conkyrc file so we can share the nice setup please?
October 24th, 2008
Shantanu,
I’m surprised at some of these responses. Desktop art is a matter of taste. Some people didn’t like yours, but I did and I’d like to thank you for taking the time to post this. People can take what you’ve done and your suggestions and sources and configure theirs to suit themselves. The details and updates are nice, I’m busy and now I have them all in one place and don’t have to search all over for them. I prefer purple, blue and orange but your green theme is one of the nicest I’ve seen. Yes, please publish the conkyrc file.
Thank you
October 24th, 2008
Thanks to all for their tips, compliments and even criticisms (Criticism the best thing one can get because it tells you about ur flaws. And special thanks to JMan. You made my day
)
I’ll publish the conkyrc file when I reach home tonight..
October 28th, 2008
Sorry for the delay guys, my site was having bandwidth issues.
Have uploaded my conkyrc file (see update2 at the top of the post). Please download and modify to suit your taste and system. Please also let me know about your own conky setups as well.
November 4th, 2008
dude if u have a gud gpu..like geforce then try enabling blur plugin for cf…ur transparency right now is quite distracting….blur clears all that out….in case u have a intel onboard card…try it with cf 0.78 or higher….and try compiling svn version of cimi’s murrine engine frome gnome svn..that wud all make an awesome glassy ubuntu..
a few month sscreenshot is here
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pic=293k6z6&s=4
November 4th, 2008
Thanks Aditya. I’ve an old but still semi-decent card for CF (ati xpress200m 128 meg).. But I went back to not using CF :). Will try out ur suggestions if and when I decide to use CF again..And yeah, just checked out the screenshot.. it definitely looks cool and is surely better in terms of being less distractive..
November 6th, 2008
Hi webmaster!
Trackbacks
Add a comment